The Colombia Free Fracking Alliance announced that a group of 40 congressmen presented before the First Administrative Court of the Barrancabermeja Circuit, Santander, a contribution to the tutelage action they sent a few days ago against the fracking driver who would be ahead in Puerto Wilches, Santander .
Among the congressmen who support the suspension of the pilot in Santander are the presidential candidate, Gustavo Petro, along with: Iván Cepeda, Angelica Lozano, Gustavo Bolivar, María José Pizarro, Feliciano Valencia, Roy Barreras, Antonio Sanguino, Jorge Robledo, Katherine Miranda, Iván Marulanda, among others.
The guardianship was filed on March 31 by the Afro-Colombian Corporation of Puerto Wilches (Afrowilches), the José Alvear Restrepo lawyers' collective and the Podion Corporation, with the accompaniment of the Colombia Free Fracking Alliance. The entities assured that continuing these projects would represent an alleged violation of fundamental rights to environmental participation, access to information, due process, and life and integrity.
“In a symbolic act, we bring constitutional action because we demand justice in the face of the arbitrariness of fracking,” the organizations said in a press release. “The Ministries of Environment and Mines and Energy have set us up, set up a theater, in which the community is supposedly participating, and in Wilches people aren't even aware of what's going on,” they added.
The organizations' main argument is that the right to prior consultation was violated in the community and that is why they are asking for the suspension of the environmental license that the National Environmental Licensing Authority (ANLA) granted to Ecopetrol to advance the pilot in the municipality.
These organizations traveled from the departments of Santander and Cesar to denounce this violation of their right of participation to various State entities. Among his arguments is that, “in Colombia there is a deficit in oil participation and environmental licensing that the Constitutional Court ordered Congress to regulate, and has not yet done so.”
In fact, in the appeal they state that community participation in the implementation of the Pilot Projects for Comprehensive Research (PPII) has not been previously sought. “What the government has produced are scenarios of socialization of decisions, briefings, and not properly concertation/consensus exercises”, the guardianship reads.
The contribution presented by the congressmen is intended to comply with community law and, in turn, to suspend the fracking pilot. As arguments they pointed out that judgments T-693 of 2012, T-576 of 2014 and T-002 of 2017, which establish the right of Afrowilches to prior consultation, “as well as other rights that may be held by the collective subject, do not require it to be constituted under some certain legally established form”.
In this way, the 40 congressmen made the following three petitions to the court: to protect the right to prior consultation of the Afro-descendant community of Afrowilches; to suspend the environmental license granted to PPII Kalé; and, to suspend the process of another application to develop the PPII Platero.
It should be recalled that the Kalé fracking project is led by Anla and has been recently rejected by the community of Puerto Wilches. On February 22, they had to suspend a public hearing on this project due to the demonstrations of those who oppose the use of water resources for mining purposes.
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